


a ribbon at a time

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Madam Secretary
Genre: Angst, F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:48:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23203468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: Family, loss, motherhood – all things that 23-year-old Elizabeth McCord does not think about
Relationships: Elizabeth McCord/Henry McCord
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	a ribbon at a time

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I'm new here but please blame teammccord for talking me into this, but also thank her for her constant cheerleading and fixing of my grammar. She sent me lilacmermaid25's prompt list a couple weeks ago which is what started this thing off, it doesn't really follow any one specifically but is inspired by a couple, I'll add them at the bottom. Title is from Emily Dickinson. Anyway, hope you enjoy? If anyone wants to chat, I'm around on tumblr sinkingsidewalks
> 
> NOTE: brief mentions of pregnancy loss, abortion, and suicide

I.

Henry goes and she sleeps on the couch. Just for the night, she tells herself two weeks on when the ache in her lower vertebrae becomes permanent and the knot beneath her shoulder blade comes with rolling waves of nausea. 

She thought it would be easier, the second time around. But instead of worrying about his safety, every single second of every single day, she just misses him. He’s a phantom limb, and each static phone call, each happy, smiling photograph tucked into the corner of her jewelry box or clinging to the front of the fridge exacerbates her pain. And she hates it. 

Six months into her life as a military wife and her husband going back to his deployment feels like the end of the world. She berates herself for it. The apartment feels empty, hallways hollow when her keys clang off the metal dish in the entryway, but she’s lived alone for years, the rotating array of roommates and dorm mates hardly different from the single room she lucked into senior year at Houghton, none of them permanent, none of them family. When she walks through campus, she finds herself lingering, at the corner where he used to wait for her after her number theory class to walk her home, where she bumped into him after their second date, and she watched his face light up with delight when he realized it was her. But her classes are in a different hall this year, her routes across campus new, so she has no reason to seek those places out. 

Henry being gone shouldn’t change much, as she does her work, meets with her professors; there’s less food in the fridge yes, and when her eyes start to burn from long hours reading and she swivels in her desk chair, ready to call it for the night, the chair behind hers – where his desk is crammed into the nook of their living room – is empty.

She throws up in a hallway garbage can midway through a lecture on the history of east Asia. Her head swims and her vision blanks and she walks out the back door of the hall with her bag left behind. Thirty five seconds later she’s heaving over the garbage can, heart thundering, mind blank in panic. 

Another minute after that, once she’s figured out how to move air through her lungs properly again, Maggie emerges from the classroom with Elizabeth’s things in hand. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Elizabeth swallows hard on her bile stained saliva and supresses the desire to disappear completely. “I must have picked up a bug.”

Maggies’ brow furrows; she’s got a motherly instinct that Elizabeth doesn’t. “Do you want me to drive you home?”

She shakes her head, taking her coat and bag from outstretched arms. “I’ll be fine. Just let me copy your notes tomorrow, okay?” 

She likes Maggie; they’re in the same program and most of the same classes so they study together often, but she’s never been good at being sick. It makes her want to curl up and disappear inside herself. 

“Okay,” Maggie says, hesitant. “But call me later if you need anything.”

“I will,” Elizabeth promises, knowing already that however bad she feels she won’t pick up the phone. 

Maggie goes back to the lecture with a nod and Elizabeth heads to the exit. Her tongue still tastes like vomit, despite the swig of juice she took to rinse it out of her mouth. It makes her feel small again, like she’s under the covers in her parent’s bed with her mother sitting next to her, reading quietly, and for a moment the longing for her mother’s hand gently brushing through her hair is so intense she has to stop and lean against the bare brick wall, trying not to cry.

Three weeks on and she doesn’t tell Henry that the flu she thought she had might just be permanent now. That every night, she jolts awake from some dream she can’t remember an hour after she’s fallen asleep and the nausea that overtakes her is hardly worse than the panic that follows. 

On the days when she knows he’s flying, she finds herself often drifting back to the day her parents died. How she sat in her room waiting for them to come home, too stubborn to leave, stomach growling as dinnertime came and went. It had taken hours after their deaths for her to learn of the news, and she wonders sometimes how long it would take them to tell her about Henry, if the military has found any efficiency with all their practice. 

For all she knows, as she sits in the dark on the worn linoleum of the bathroom floor with the taste of bile in her mouth, he could be dead right now.

She gets up off the floor anyway, clears the taste out of her mouth with a swig of mouthwash, and crawls back into bed, flicking the bedside lamp on. She won’t sleep anytime soon, so she pulls her thesis notes open onto the bed around her and burrows in. The sheets don’t smell like him anymore, not even a little, but part of her can pretend that he’s simply in the other room, falling asleep over his own desk. 

The first time he brings up moving in together she shuts him down completely. He hardly mentions it, only says that he and his roommate have agreed not to renew their lease, but they’ve been together for eight months and it’s the longest relationship she’s ever been in. 

The crux of it though is that she’s had both too much and too little control over her living conditions. Moving to Houghton, choosing UVA, the dorms, and her apartment, every choice had to be made methodically, weighing the pros and cons, the risks and rewards. Most kids her age would have a fallback, a family home to return to in the face of roommate fallouts and bedbug infestations, but Elizabeth lost that a long time ago. Her physical security may be well accounted for, she’s certain she’ll never be homeless; but Henry’s proposing an emotional home she’d long discounted, one she’s certain that if it crumbled, so would she. 

She considers herself fearless, always has. When she was eight, she pulled out her own baby tooth with a string of floss and a slamming door. At eleven, she clung to the neck of a half broke horse as it raced around the paddock, got thrown into the dirt, then got right back on. At fifteen, she lost her whole world and kept herself alive. But precisely three things scare her about Henry McCord: first, she loves him, second, he loves her, and third, he’s joining the army and he’s going to leave her. 

II.

“Maybe you’re pregnant,” Maggie says after Elizabeth once again returns from a too-hasty trip to the bathroom. 

“What?!” Elizabeth yelps, face going greener than it already was. The librarian shoots them both a dirty look and she lowers her voice to a whisper. “Why would you say that?”

Maggie shrugs. “Morning sickness doesn’t just happen in the morning.”

She swallows against her stomach acting up again, a new kind of queasy now joining the familiar. She can’t be pregnant; Henry left weeks ago. 

But she also hasn’t marked a period down on her calendar since he did. She berates herself for thinking it. Her periods are often odd, prone to being late or non-existent due to stress or illness. She’s just got a bug that won’t go away, on top of being worried about Henry and stressed about her master’s. It makes sense. 

She can convince herself of that. 

When her period hits three weeks late for the first time ever, she’s seventeen and alone. She’s got no maternal figure to turn to, no girlfriends to worry with; she’s certainly not going to talk to Will about it. Even if she had someone to tell, she can hardly think the possibility to herself.

She goes up to the roof for the first time in years, cracks through the dust seal on the escape door at the top of the staircase, and looks down on the whole of the campus. She determined years ago that the seven storey fall would definitely kill her but the bottle of contraband liquor in her hand weighs heavier now. 

She drinks as the stars come up. On a clear night in April, well into the warmth of spring and with only the dim lights of campus glowing, she can count them appear one by one until they’re too numerable, like the freckles on her mother’s arms worn in by the sun, until her eyes start to blur and she realizes she’s crying. Hot, fat tears spiral down her cheeks, her breath coming in gasps and hiccups. Her chest aches. 

Her mother’s dead. 

It shouldn’t be like this anymore, shouldn’t be a sharp wound, a piece of shrapnel embedded in her flesh, years on. Grief is supposed to fade, with time she’s supposed to heal, that’s what everyone said, hours and days and weeks after the funeral, when all she could do was stand and nod, shell-shocked, gripping onto Will’s shoulders to keep him from pitching any kind of fit. 

But it still hurts – not just when she’ll walk across the stage at graduation, when she meets her boyfriend’s parents on family day, but all the time. She misses her dad when she’s three hours into a study session and has no one to pull her away with a joke, her mom when she can’t quite find the right words to use in a paper, to say to her teacher, or Will. It doesn’t go away.

She likes Victor, likes his quick witted humour and kind eyes. She likes their nightly study dates – sprawled out over the floor of her dorm room, blessedly isolated from dorm mates and hall monitors – that are more date than study. She knows she hasn’t been as careful as she should be. That doesn’t mean she wants his baby; she doesn’t want kids at all. 

The bottle is more than half empty now and she takes another swig. It burns, but hardly more noticeably than the tears still clogging up her eyes that burn all the way into her lungs. It’ll be hours until the sun rises, until anyone notices she’s not in her bed. She determined years ago that the seven storey fall would definitely kill her. 

Four days later she starts bleeding. 

The line is so static that his voice hardly sounds like his voice. She misses every third syllable, has the phone pressed tight against her ear, leaving an impression on her cheek, like hard plastic and metal coils could bring him any closer to her. 

She loops the phone cord around her index finger, a schoolgirl twirling a strand of hair as she talks to her crush, and pulls it until she can watch her skin turn white. The cord cuts into her skin, harsh plastic biting, threatening to break until she releases it. The rush of blood aches. 

“Henry,” She whispers over the line, half hoping he won’t hear. If he were standing beside her, sitting across from her at the dinner table, walking a half step ahead to show her something, it would have shut him up instantly, would have him turning every ounce of his attention to her, and blocking out the rest of the world. 

“Elizabeth?” He answers, somehow still managing to make her feel completely in focus even from across the world. 

He waits for her response and she doesn’t know what to say. The phone line wheezes between them and Elizabeth thinks he must be able to hear the slow, hard beats of her heart too. She takes a deep breath. 

“I think I might be pregnant.”

He swears, loud and harsh, away from the mouthpiece of the phone. Through the static she can only hear the rough end of the consonants. It’s so startling a reaction that she can’t choke down the bubble of laughter that climbs out of her throat. 

“I’m so sorry I’m not there with you.” His voice drops low, like he’s talking in her ear with an arm wrapped around her shoulders and by some miracle the phone line holds together well enough for her to hear a complete sentence clearly. 

The edge of her anxiety wears off. “Me too.” 

She feels lightheaded, like she might collapse, that standing in the front hall, her shoulder lodged into the wall for support, the whole building might just crumble beneath her. She’s never been in an earthquake before but she thinks it might feel something like this. 

“Have you thought about what you might want to do?”

“I- what- no?”

They’ve talked about having a family – in the future, once she’s finished her master’s, once he’s done his time in the military. Not now. Not when the apartment’s empty and he’s only a voice, barely making it through the phone line. 

She thought he’d be overjoyed. That it’d be a light at the end of the tunnel of his deployment, that he would light up when she said the words and she’d be able to hear it in his voice even if she couldn’t see it. Of course he knows her better than that. 

Of course he understands, without her having to put it into words, the tightness in her chest that halts her every time she thinks it, that comes along with the term mother. 

She never thought Henry would be the one to bring up discussing ‘options’ though. 

“I love you,” he says, like his conviction is enough to carry the words across an ocean and a continent, with the certainty that he’s praying and God will hear him. 

“I love you too,” she says and it feels like a weight on her chest. 

III.

She sits on the closed lid of the toilet seat, staring at the piece of plastic sitting on the edge of the sink. The lights are slightly too dim, a bulb burnt out over a week ago and while she could change it herself, she hasn’t. The timer on the kitchen stove rings out through the apartment and she doesn’t allow time to steel herself. 

One line. She’s not pregnant. 

She flips the other two over – she’s nothing if not thorough – and they bear the same result. 

She’s not pregnant. 

She slumps back against the wall. She can’t tell if what she’s feeling is relief or not. The stove timer rings out again, abandoned, but she doesn’t get up to stop it. 

It feels all kinds of wrong. Henry should be pacing outside the bathroom door. She should be holding his hand tight enough to feel their bones press together. There should be elation, happy tears and nervous butterflies. He should hug her tightly, voice gentle when he asks if they should start trying for real. If it were a movie the music would swell.

Instead the stove blares louder, warning that dinner might be ruined, that the sugar cookies are quickly blackening. She hauls herself up to turn it off before Mrs. Dartmoor in 3B can complain. The interior walls of the building are too thin. The windows are double-paned, they hardly leech any heat at all against the whip of winter wind, but early in the morning, before the sun comes up and she’s making coffee because her bed is cold, she can hear Mrs. Dartmoor sneeze in her own adjacent kitchen. 

It’s late now though, it took her too much of the day to work up the courage to take the tests, and she should go to bed but instead she settles down on the couch, wraps herself in the ugly knit throw that came with him from his childhood home. It’s dark out, but she doesn’t turn on a light. 

There’s an air of disappointment when she tells him too. Relief, mostly about the timing, but she can tell that in the days between their calls he’d conjured up the image of their child and fallen just a little bit in love with it. 

“Someday,” she tells him, the word sticks to her teeth like toffee. It’s not a lie, but it’s a promise she doesn’t know if she can keep. 

She never thought about kids when she was younger, wasn’t the type of little girl to wed her dolls, to coo over a friend’s baby sibling, even Will was a disinterest to her until he was an accomplice. Then her parents died, and she was sure she could never do that to her own child, could never risk it. Besides, how could she be a mother when her only frame of reference is the dimming memory of a young teenager. 

Henry threw a wrench in that plan, in her whole life plan really. She always thought love like this was trapped in storybooks and fairytales. She never imagined it would happen to her.

But he wants a family, has never made a secret of it, and somehow, she wants a family with him, despite the pit the thought lodges in her stomach, the nervous energy it lends to her fingertips. Despite the initial rush of disappointment, she can’t quite bring herself to make that choice yet.

Henry is full of reassuring words, the electric hum of the phone rattles in her ear, if she presses close enough she can almost imagine it’s the vibration of his voice instead, how she can feel it in her jawbone when he talks close to her ear. 

Someday, she thinks, maybe, and for now that’s enough for both of them.

When the late afternoon sun is waning Maggie arrives at her door with a backpack full of notes and two family sized bags of chips. They settle down in the living room for a comfortably familiar study session, orange light spilling through the windows over them. The chip bags split open; salt pools beneath Elizabeth’s tongue. 

Maggie chatters while they work – the reason they work well together – comfortable, senseless words that she doesn’t have to pay attention to but break up the harsh line of silence in the apartment. 

“I’m not pregnant,” Elizabeth says, the words falling out in a rush. 

Maggie takes another chip from the bag and crunches on it. “Okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> Prompts: 1. Elizabeth wonders how she ended up as a military wife when her single greatest fear is being left alone 2. Elizabeth has a miscarriage while Henry is serving overseas and she struggles to tell him about it 3. Henry is the last person Elizabeth would ever expect to remind her that abortion is an option.


End file.
